New Dashboard

Oct 31, 2006 @ 3:16 am

Matt

We’ve been giving a lot of thought into how to make the home page of the dashboard more useful for you. This is the most-loaded page in our admin backend, but the balance of community vs. personal information wasn’t that good, and the design with the grey boxes and such left something to be desired.

Well, now we have something new.

We’ve split the dashboard into two, the left which shows all the action happening in your world — new posts, comments, comments you’ve left — and the right, which shows the hottest stuff in your language’s community. (And provides good fodder for blogging.)

We’ve also done a bit to make the whole thing load faster.

I’m pretty curious to hear you thoughts on this, particularly on anything you would like to see in the activity stream on the left. That’s an area I think is going to change a lot based on your feedback.

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Awesome really cool now it more usable than ever.. I was not really a fan of your oversized fonts. Though t might be very web 2.0 it not very readable and you had to scroll a lot. This looks way much better.
Great work.
P.S Could this be implemented in wordpress 2.1

Hey Matt, I love the new dashboard. I think it is more “intuitive” and very well organized. But I think it doesn´t “refresh” very well: in the “a while ago” section I can see the titles of posts I have deleted some time ago. I click on them and obviously it takes me to a page that doesn´t exist. Another thing: can we see 10 of the “best blogs of WP.com today” instead of 4? (maybe a “see more” link or something).

Keep the good work. Thank you and all the people at WP.com very much!!!

You guys gave me a (near) heart attack. I thought my connection finally balked and I was able to see only 4 links. Then I clicked on my hot stuff and found out. Nice. Loads up quite faster so my heartiest thanks! And um.. Dashboard has been spelled Dashbaord…

Glad everybody likes it! I personally think there’s still some tweaking that can be done (maybe I’m just being anal), but keep the comments coming! We really want to make this as useful to you as possible.

i agree 25 cent life, in that all the comments and posts i left, along with those commenting my blog, should not be all jumbled into one column. Maybe if you split everything into sub-headed groups under “today” and the other date headers, that would be a little more organised and intuitive.

By the way! This is a sugesstion! How about making “Your Stuff” left side box with the action related to particular blog.. that, if someone have more than one blog on an username, he/she might willing to know about the particular blog actions.

I liked the old dashboard MUCH better and do not like the way it is set up now at ALL. It is harder for me to get to where I need to to edit my blog and easily see who has left me a comment for approval.😦

I use the dashboard for managing my blog so now having half the space dedicated to off-site issues is too much, I think. I also have to scroll to see what I used to see in just a glance. It does seem to load a little faster, at least to the first page (after that it is as slow as usual)

I’m on dial-up so my preference still is to put local stuff at top and general WP stuff at bottom. I can then go to the WP stuff at leisure after taking care of business first.

I have 3 blogs on WP
The comments and posts from those 3 blogs are together in section “Your Stuff”. I don’t think this is a good idea
In my humble opinion It will be better to see only comments from chosen blog

Maybe I am resistant to change, but I think perhaps I liked the old arrangement better. The first place my eye would fall was on the “recent activities” box and for my little blog at least, quickly see what, if anything had changed (mostly comments, of course.) The my eye would go down to the WP.com news links.

And maybe sometime later, I might look at the “hot blogs, new posts” stuff around WordPress. I think the “my stuff” column is too disorganized and busy and the “what’s hot” column a bit to “pushy” as compared to where it used to be.

The new dashboard is definitely easier on the eyes. I’ve also read you are going to bring the “Incoming links” feature back.🙂

However, I have posting access on two blogs and when I use the “My Dashboards” link to choose *one* of them, it still shows me the content of *both* blogs. It’s all mixed together. (I think the only difference is the Akismet spam filter showing different counts, but I could be mistaken.)

A clearer distinction between the new posts and the new comments would be nice, too. I guess it depends on whether you need to view your blog activities chronologically, or rather have them sorted by content / type. (For me, personally, it’s not important to know if a post/comment is from this week, last week, or “awhile ago”.)

it looks great, and i like the outlook-esque timeline. it’s a little weird to have the same post linked several times (once for each comment, plus for the post itself). you might want to add an excerpt of each item so that it’s not redundant, or group the items together (BLC style).

While I usually love what you do, I DON’T like this change.
Why? I have two blogs.
One has contributions from other people [http://crikeymatemosaic.wordpress.com] but the other doesn’t. I also set up blog posts many days in advance on both. I cannot tell which posts belong to which blog because they all are combined and my titles don’t give it away as the two blogs are on related topics. This is bound to confuse those on the crikeymatemosaic blog with many contributors as they are not usually bloggers.

PLEASE SEPARATE OUT DIFFERENT BLOGS WHICH BELONG TO THE SAME USER!!!
[Yes, I’m shouting but I really want you to take notice of this!]

On one blog http://mosaik.wordpress.com I try to blog at least daily. I need to be able to see what future posts I have planned so that I can slot posts in on the days with no planned posts.
Bring back the future posts and put it somewhere near the top of the page so that I don’t have to scroll down too far😉.

The new Dashboard is just confusing. Especially in the sense of the whole WP-thing, which – at least for me – always stood for a clear and unflattered identity. That means that you always have to focus on the most important, and many less important things have to be left out. The newe dashboard tries to give so much information, that i am not even want to look at all that stuff.

As Scobleizer says, the comments are the key for access to the content which is actually discussed on a blog. (btw, there isn’t even a option to show the users more than the last 5 comments from the frontpage).

And then this blu-white-blue-white with all that mixed-up stuff. Just a few weeks ago you released the Tag-Surfer and MyComments for the people who have the time for that gimmicks. So why do i have to mess around again with that stuff in my important daily listing-stuff?

I need a dashboard which helps my organize my blog. For information about we have already enough options. That’s the point, i think. Options are fine, but the choice is the key to them.

So please don’t get me wrong. I just wanted to give you instant feedback on that. I still love you guys!😉

oh, and i have forgotten sthg important. I have 1 main blog, and 2 set up for testing purposes. So i don’t need all that infos from this blogs mixed up. If i need to look at them, i can easily switch to that particular dashboard. If people need that functionality, give them the /choice/ to get it, if you think that’s important enough.

i’d like to see the left column categorized on what it is instead of when it was. (like new comments, comments i’ve posted, new posts) plus the “a while ago” info is a waste of space. i know what happened a month ago.

Though I agree with what was mentioned earlier about having the ‘New comments’,’New posts’ and ‘Commented’ all mixed up together. Would it be possible for them to be grouped together in the list? I think this would make it easier to read. Also ‘Commented’ seems to disappear after the last week listing.

I don’t like it😦 But there is something weird going on with mine – it looks nothing like it’s supposed to be! I have to log in every single time I try an go to a new page (write post, edit comments, view dashboard etc) even if I tick the ‘remember me’ box and I cant see both sides at the same time! very annoying! is there something I have to change in my settings or something?

I, too, miss the incoming links, and would prefer a little more order in the ‘My Stuff’ area. Never liked the grey boxes, so glad to see them go, but the way my own posts and comments were organised was nice and clear.

Well! This is a big change…uhm. i think i need sometime to feel confortable with it…
But i think that it’s work…it’s only that it’s different from the last dashboard ^_-
And …yes… the comment plus the last article do some confusion me too…
Thanks!!!
Astasia

the your stuff section has wayyyyy too much information even for a megalomaniac. i don’t need to know when, where i commented the week before and who commented on my post a while back, and if i do i won’t have any problems going through the archive. i prefer the old dashboard summary of stats, like how many comments i have in my blog and a few of the recent posts, etc etc. the what’s hot section is an improvement from the previous dashboard, though.

I like it.
It loads a whole lot faster, bearing in mind I post new blogs from work were I usualy have seven applications open and running as well as at least six web browsers all at the same time. The first thing I noticed was the speed which is Very nice indeed.
The new dashboard also looks a whole lot better, alot less cluttered and easier to read what is going on in a comunity I realy must get around to being part of.

Anyway. You lot in the Back office have done well with this, give yourselfes a pat on the back, you deserve it.

At first I was like, “Whoa! New Dash!” I wanted to make a comment here right away. After skimming through the commentary, I took another look at the Dash from an user-friendly PoV and realized that it is a bit confusing. I like that you can see “your world” and the “popular blogging world” at the same time, but the mix of comments and new posts, although labeled respectively, is a bit clutter-looking. I’d suggest Recent Posts and Comments be separated, and that only Comments have a distinct separated listing of comments from [yesterday, a week ago, etc.]. The way it’s set up now reminds me of Feedreader’s interface, which is cool, but as I said, disorderly.

Everything else seems fine with me. I like that you added direct links (e.g. Posts, change profile, etc.) since the loading time between clicking “Blogroll” and then “Add Bookmark” is quite long sometimes. Maybe that’s just my shared bandwidth connection screwing me over. The improved loading speed of the Dash is great! That’s what I always hit first, so great job with that. Page Scrolling is fairly the same as it was, and also with the double columns, finding a hot WP story takes a second or two less than scrolling to the bottom gray boxes. Just add in the Incoming Links when you’re able and it’ll be set.

Nice to see I’m not the only who was caught off guard when this happened!
Overall it doesn’t seem to bad (I tend to be a tad conservative; with a small c) but at present I find myself aligning with the 2 post crowd. Although I can understand the logic of seeing your own activity regardless of what blog your logged into it does make things a bit confusing.
Perhaps secondary blog activity can be placed lower down? Is that possible? Or can you give the posts, comments, etc disinguishing flags?

While I think the “What’s hot” column is all nice and clear, the “Your stuff” one just isn’t. I liked the older organization much better, when the latest comments, incoming links, etc. were all listed under separate headers… so I agree with a lot of others on that one. I liked it when before when I got to my dashboard, I could immediately look to the right and see if there was a new comment without having to look for that information in the middle of a lot of other links.
But otherwise I do appreciate the work you’re doing.

Hey, cool new dashboard, guys! One thing though — I have two blogs and all my posts and whatnot from both blogs appear under “Your Stuff”. It makes stuff a bit organized and defeats the purpose of maintaining separate blogs instead of just splitting stuff under two major tags in one blog.